Jduv’s Echo Quest II: The Boss DD-7
About two months ago I procured three of the stand alone delays that I have on my list: Boss DD-7, Line6 Echo Park, and the T-Rex Replica. After playing with them and letting them soak for a bit, I believe I finally have some solidified opinions on each of them. I'll rank each on the following standards:
- Sound Quality
- Ease of use
- Range of Application
Each category will be ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, and the rating will appear beside the section heading. I'll also give a brief summary of my thoughts on the product overall at the end. I'll split this up into three parts.
Boss DD-7
A good, solid, industry standard delay. Unfortunately you have to buy a $20 foot switch for it to have an external tap tempo, but I needed the same foot switch for my DD-20 so I already had it. The price tag isn't terrible at $159 new.
Sound Quality: (8/10) The sound quality of this unit is very nice. I believe it is designed to target the "airy pad" guitar player who wants a lot of smoothness added to the tone. Like all Boss pedals, it has a buffer inside that colors the tone of the output signal slightly darker. This isn't a problem for most people, but tone purists beware.
As a digital delay, the DD-7 is lacking. Due to the darkening characteristic of the on board buffer the delays are pretty and airy, but not clean and crisp like I would expect a pure digital delay to deliver. The analog emulation setting is amazing, however. It has a very nice decay that sounds super vintage and extremely warm when coupled with the tone of the buffer inside the pedal. Self-oscillation is a little subdued in the analog delay model, but still sounds good and is usable. The modulation delay setting is terrible. It isn't easy to control modulation depth and speed easily, and it doesn't sound vintage at all. It's usable, however, unless you are going for a very specific tone.
I didn't care much for the reverse setting or the looper mode, so I won't review those at all. Once you've heard one reverse effect you've heard them all.
Ease of Use: (6/10) The DD-7 has the standard interface of Boss pedals that players have grown to love--or hate. There are four knobs to work with: one for effect level, one for number of repeats, one for delay time, and one for delay mode. The delay mode is broken up into two delay emulation modes, a reverse mode, a loop mode, and five time slice modes. The DD-7's interface lends itself to a single mode, effect mix, and repeat level. It is very static in nature. The knobs are situated so closely together that changing things on the fly is quite irritating, and the unit's on-board tap tempo requires some tap dancing to use effectively. Since I have the $20 external foot switch this isn't a problem, but Boss still gets dinged for that requirement.
Subdivision--a very highly valued feature on my list--is available only if you have the unit in one of the time slice modes. Unfortunately each time slice mode is labeled as some number of milliseconds making it quite tough to guess what you get from each setting. Not very intuitive.
Range of Application: (5/10) This pedal is pretty much a one trick pony. It sounds like a Boss DD-7, and you get that sound and nothing else. There's not much in the way of customization or change of tonality based on the instrument you are using. It will always darken the tone. However, the DD-7 does what it does very well, even if it doesn't do much.
Summary and Overall Rating: (6.33/10) The DD-7 is a great pedal, it's just not what I'm looking for. It has a nice small footprint if you don't count the space the external tap tempo you will need to buy takes up, it sounds wonderful on analog mode, and it's built like a tank. Unfortunately it isn't terribly versitile, sounds lifeless on anything other than analog mode, and is a pain to use at a live show unless you have a couple of them. In summary it's better than my DD-20, but not good enough to make it on my board except as an emergency backup.